Alternative to jagged array for the Inspector?

Unity Engine
1

I want to define a bunch of pairs of strings. For each pair, I want to perform something. This sounds like the job for a jagged array, but apparently you can’t define that in the Inspector. :cry:

Is there a good way to do this without having to define classes?

2

You could possibly create two arrays of strings and just compare back and forth… That would be messy, of course, but not that bad.

You could also create a script that has the pair of strings and the functionality. After that, you’d just need an array of those scripts.

3

I’m not sure if those solutions could be helpful. Here’s what I have at this point, which is not bad, but like I said, I think I should be able to do it without classes. But there’s no way I’m not using the Editor to input values! :slight_smile:

This is something I attach to whatever game object, in order to be able to input/store the names in the Editor. I would like for pairs to be a string[ ][ ], not a Pair[ ].

using UnityEngine;

public class _in_editor_setup : MonoBehaviour {


public Pair[] pairs;

[System.Serializable]
public class Pair
{
	public string nameA;
	public string nameB;
}


}

This is a script that will be attached to a prefab that gets instantiated if any objects in an FBX file match the name of the prefab. Hence, because I will be reimporting that FBX file countless times, there’s no way I’m going to reassign all the “_linkedThing” variables. In my current game, that’s about 10 variables or so, and they’re buried deep in a hierarchy.

using UnityEngine;

public class _thing : MonoBehaviour {
	
public Transform _linkedThing;
	
}

Finally, here’s a menu item that automatically assigns the variable appropriately.

using UnityEngine;
using UnityEditor;

class _setup {


[ MenuItem("Custom/Setup") ]
static void Setup ()
{	
	_in_editor_setup inEditorSetup = Object.FindObjectOfType(typeof(_in_editor_setup) ) as _in_editor_setup;
	
	foreach (_in_editor_setup.Pair pair in inEditorSetup.pairs)
	{
		GameObject GameObjectA = GameObject.Find(pair.nameA);
		GameObject GameObjectB = GameObject.Find(pair.nameB);
			
		if (GameObjectA  GameObjectB)
		{
			_thing ScriptA = (GameObjectA.GetComponentInChildren( 
				typeof(_thing) ) as _thing);
			_thing ScriptB = (GameObjectB.GetComponentInChildren( 
				typeof(_thing) ) as _thing);
				
			Transform thingA = ScriptA.transform;
			Transform thingB = ScriptB.transform;
	
			ScriptA.linkedThing = thingB;
			ScriptB.linkedThing = thingA;
		}			
	}
}


}

(Also, I’ve started using underscores for class names like that, because I’m not dealing with Unity lowercasing all the stuff in my Assets folder anymore.)

4

It’s a bit low-tech, but it is common in programming to use alternate elements of a string array for pairs, say for key/value combinations. I’ve found this kind of thing quite handy for editor scripts, even though it is untidy and slightly error-prone.

5

Thanks, andeeee. I considered that, and due to the fact that all the pairs are going to have names like “Thing 1A”, “Thing 1B”, “Thing 2A”, “Thing 2B”, etc., it’s probably not a bad solution.